Pages

Friday, 8 June 2012

Do It Like A Rockstar!

...Dave Sim was comics' first Rock Star - showing up at signings in
limos, hosting late night comic con parties and generally having a hell
of a time. But he was also the kind of rockstar that [Amanda] Palmer is:
encouraging others, inspiring them and turning the business of comics on
its head. Other people had self-published before Sim, but few did it
with the business acumen and drive that Dave did. With his modest
success, Dave created a space in the back of his monthly book to
showcase other independent creator’s work. And he was almost always
ready to help people interested in self-publishing - when his Kickstarter campaign launched multiple creators tweeted about Dave's selfless help.
But back to my main point: the fans - Just look through the letters
columns in the back of Cerebus and you will see a kooky bunch trading
in-jokes, discussing their lives and the work. One of that bunch would
be Dave Sim, who always seemed more like a moderator than some Great
Creator responding to his worship; something that the few creators who
even answered their own letters back in those days often came off
sounding like.

And what fans! There were oddballs galore: vampires and feuding
siblings and hateful love triangles, all people letting their freak
flags fly in a safe and understanding environment. Some even went on to
become fairly powerful forces in the comic industry themselves. And it
was this connection with fans that gave Cerebus, an independent black
and white comic with a cover price ⅓ higher than almost everything else
in the store, monthly sales in the sort of numbers that Marvel, DC and
Image would kill for today. And it was this same strong fan base that,
as Stephen Bissette pointed out, allowed Sim to change the entire comic
industry.

When all the distributors implicitly refused to carry the first
Cerebus "phonebook" (A tome collecting 25 issues of the Cerebus saga in
one, square-bound, 500 odd page book) their argument wasn't really that
bad. Simply put, it had never been done before, stores weren't going to
stock it and fans weren't going to buy it. Comics just didn't come that
big. All this was true. Dave, after getting feedback from fans, mostly
in letter columns and at conventions, decided that it just wasn’t true.
He printed an initial run of 5,000 books and offered them directly
through the back pages of Cerebus. One need simply mail a money order or
call up his office with a credit card and the book would be shipped
out. Retailers, who Sim has always been a huge supporter of, could get
multiple copies at a discount.

When the initial run of 5,000 books sold out (quite quickly, actually)
the retailers relented and begged Sim to let them carry his book. Dave,
always one to force others to stick to their guns, refused. He relented
on subsequent books and eventually on all of them, but he never stopped
trying to prove that it was the artist and the fans, not the giant
corporations and not the distributors, who had the real relationship.

Look around your local comic shop, or any bookstore with a "Graphic
Novel" section. Are there square bound books? Books that exceed 80
pages? Damn right there are. Dave Sim literally reinvented the way that
the comic book industry did business, more than once. And he used it by
knowing, trusting and respecting his fans and by never letting his work
get diluted by anyone else's vision of it. Amanda Palmer has set the
stage for a new revolution within the music industry, here's hoping that
she's as successful as Dave.

Amanda Palmer's recent Kickstarter campaign raised $1,192,173 in a fundraiser that ended on 31 May 2012. Although
other enterprises at the crowd-sourcing website had passed the
$1-million mark before, hers was the first musical project to do so. You can donate to Dave Sim's Kickstarter fundraiser right now, helping him to make all 6,000 pages of Cerebus available online.

"I AM NOT DAVE SIM"

This is an UNOFFICIAL fan-site. Although Dave Sim posts a Weekly Update here every Friday and other exclusive articles, Dave Sim and Gerhard have no control over the other content of this site ~ Tim W.